Chapter 135: The Broken Bracer
Gwen stood near the edge of the Sanctum parapet, the cold night wind pulling at her hair. She still wore her damaged Spider-Woman suit, her mask resting on the stone ledge beside her.
Ethan barely cleared the doorway before Gwen turned, grabbed the front of his shirt and backed him against the parapet. She kissed him hard, pulling him down to meet her, still breathing hard from the fight with a grin pressed against his mouth.
"I crushed his emitter," Gwen murmured against his mouth, breathless and smiling. "Right under my heel."
Ethan caught her waist. "I know. I watched the entire fight from the roof across the alley."
Gwen pulled back just enough to look at him. Her smile widened before she kissed him again, pressing her weight against his chest.
Before the moment could go any further, Natasha's voice cut crisply through Ethan's earpiece.
"My bracer is completely dead," Natasha said. "Hill is on the line. She has an update on Daniel Mercer."
Ethan and Gwen went back downstairs to the workshop.
Natasha stood beneath the workshop lights with the ruined dimensional bracer on the table. The outer casing was scorched around one edge and warped from the sudden magical feedback when her Guard shattered under Mason's sonic round. Its etched runes remained dark when Ethan pushed a pulse of magic into them.
On the nearby monitor, Maria Hill appeared through a secure video connection.
"I traced the internal footprint attached to Mercer's reactivated account," Hill said without preamble. "The user didn't just authorize a ghost truck. They accessed an old Project Rebirth logistics archive before moving the Destroyer fragment."
Natasha crossed her arms. "What does an old super-soldier archive have to do with Asgardian metal?"
"Nothing. The archive gave them dormant transport routes and Cold War storage sites nobody checks anymore. They used one as a blind spot."
"One of those routes was reactivated recently. It disappears behind several shell companies, but I'm still following it. Give me a few hours."
"Send everything to my terminal the second the movement list is complete," Natasha told her.
Hill nodded and severed the connection.
Ethan turned the bracer over in his hands. He could restore the warped casing and redraw the damaged runes, but that would only return it to the same design that had failed under Mason's sonic round.
"I can repair it," Ethan said, setting it down. "Tony can rebuild the housing so it doesn't fail the same way twice. We'll take it to him in the morning."
The next morning, sunlight spilled across Ethan's bed as Natasha entered carrying a breakfast tray, the dead bracer hooked through two fingers of her free hand.
Gwen straddled Ethan's lap, kissing him instead of getting dressed.
Natasha set the tray on the bedside table and placed a cup of coffee just beyond Gwen's reach. "Tony has already called twice."
Gwen broke the kiss but kept her knees planted on either side of Ethan's hips as she reached for the cup. Natasha slid it three inches farther away.
Gwen gave her a flat look.
Natasha raised the dead bracer. "Stark is waiting."
Gwen sighed and climbed off Ethan. She grabbed the damaged Spider-Woman suit from the chair beside the bed. Mason's last blast had burned out part of the acoustic mesh, and she wasn't going back into the field until they repaired it.
Ethan opened a golden portal onto Tony Stark's Malibu workshop, and the three of them stepped through.
Tony spun around in his chair, waving a stylus. "How did you cook the housing without the cutoff taking your arm with it?"
Natasha tossed the warped bracer onto his diagnostic table. "The cutoff worked. The casing didn't."
Tony opened the outer shell and ran the scanner across the warped metal.
"The cutoff saved your arm," Tony said. "The shell twisted around the runic channels, so the bracer cut off your energy before the damage reached you."
Tony rebuilt the casing around a segmented inner frame, added a shock-damping layer between the outer shell and the runic channels, and installed a mechanical breakaway release. Once the physical work was finished, Ethan redrew the damaged runes and connected them to the new housing.
Natasha locked the bracer around her wrist. The orange lines lit again. Tony connected a diagnostic lead and simulated an overload. The runes shut down, and the casing released cleanly instead of locking around her arm.
Gwen laid the damaged suit across the second worktable. Ethan moved the Plumber analyzer over the burned section, using the intact mesh around it to map the original pattern.
Tony repaired the ordinary suit layers while Ethan restored the damaged weave. Once the mesh was whole again, Tony ran Mason's recorded frequency through a bench emitter and adjusted the repaired nodes until the dampening response matched the undamaged sections.
"It protected you from the worst of the blast," Tony said. "But you two are treating experimental defensive equipment like disposable clothing."
"We'll try to dodge more politely next time," Gwen offered.
With the repairs finished, Ethan reached into his inventory and withdrew the refined Uru billet Odin had given him.
Tony stopped working instantly. The stylus slipped from his fingers as he stared at the dark block of god-metal.
Ethan set it on the reinforced central table and drew a containment ward around the edge.
"You may scan it," Ethan said. "Low-output energy tests only. No cutting, melting or physical samples."
Tony recorded the baseline readings, then applied a measured electrical pulse followed by a narrow burst of heat. Both spread through the billet instead of remaining where they struck.
Ethan compared the results with the Uru Resonance Data and the Asgardian Rune Primer. The billet was accepting the energy and redistributing it through its entire mass, but neither test produced any physical change.
"It's a sponge that decides what it wants to drink," Tony muttered.
The readings helped Ethan understand how Uru carried energy, but they did not contain the dwarven process used to forge it. Tony's equipment could not safely deform the billet, and Ethan was not going to experiment blindly with Odin's only gift. Tony retained the scan data, and Ethan returned the Uru to his inventory.
As Ethan returned the Uru to his inventory, Natasha's secure phone chimed. Coulson's name appeared on the screen.
She accepted the call and routed it to Tony's main monitor. Phil Coulson appeared, wrapped in heavy winter gear.
"We have something," Coulson said. The biting wind of the Arctic Circle howled through the audio feed.
The search team had finally located the wreckage of the Valkyrie buried deep beneath a glacial shelf.
Coulson forwarded several images directly to Tony's main monitor. The massive HYDRA bomber was crushed on one side, entombed within a frozen cavern, but the structural integrity of the fuselage was largely intact.
"We detected a human body near the cockpit," Coulson reported.
The search team had drilled a narrow bore through the ice and fed a camera and medical probe into the damaged fuselage. The body produced no useful thermal reading, but the close-range probe detected faint cardiac activity and a heartbeat so slow it barely registered.
Coulson sent the final image from the probe. The camera peered through the ice around the cockpit, revealing the frosted edge of a circular shield painted red, white and blue. A hand in worn leather remained wrapped around its interior strap.
Tony's hand went still against the console. Howard had filled most of his childhood with stories about Captain America. Now the shield was sitting beneath the ice in front of him, and Tony had no joke ready.
An identification file popped up beside the image.
Captain Steven Grant Rogers.
Coulson looked back into the camera.
"We found Captain America."
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